Nuxeo Offers To Contribute Core To Eclipse Foundation: What It Means For The DAM & ECM Market
ECM and DAM vendor, Nuxeo, have offered to contribute the Nuxeo Core to the Eclipse Foundation and it will become known as the Eclipse Enterprise Content Repository (if their proposal is accepted). Eric Barroca, CEO of Nuxeo is quoted on the Nuxeo Press Release as follows:
“We have decided to spin off this project from our company to ignite innovation in the content management space. The content repository is the core technology of any application managing structured or unstructured business content. Too often developers implement ad-hoc repositories on top of bare SQL databases. We are taking the opportunity presented by CMIS to offer a great technology and hope it will foster innovation in our space.” [Read More]
The move is an interesting one for two different reasons. Firstly, it positions Nuxeo’s technology as a ‘building block’ for other solutions (especially with the built-in CMIS support) so, it is likely to increase their market share and dominance of the ECM/DAM market. Why build your own ECM suite when you can just use the pre-rolled Nuxeo one?
Secondly, it indicates the increased commoditisation of the DAM and ECM market around core platforms. Nuxeo’s initiative invites a proliferation of ECM solutions. It seems more than likely that Nuxeo (or their investors) have noted the market trend and this is a move designed to ensure that while other products may come and go, they will survive because their core technology is baked into numerous other products that depend upon it. This offers Nuxeo a method of directly competing with SharePoint and could be bad news for the proprietary end of the ECM sector (especially the mega-vendors).
If you are looking to extrapolate a trend from this latest initiative, it’s divergence between platform users and platform developers. The former will be able to rapidly engineer a DAM or ECM product with fairly advanced capabilities (courtesy of the platform developers) via some medium skill development resources. The flip-side will be high levels of competition and steadily declining margins – all the way down to nothing eventually. When the DAM/ECM bubble eventually bursts as an excess of new entrants try and get in on the act and compete on price, it will be the platform developers who are embedded into all these competing solutions who should survive.
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